The increasingly mobile, remote and distributed nature of today's workforce makes it difficult for an organization to provide adequate administrative support for their workers. As a result, the workers themselves must spend part of their working day identifying, procuring, managing, coordinating and accessing the services they need to perform their job. Additionally, even people who are not mobile or remote workers find that they have less time to spend in organizing the services they need for their business or personal life.
This problem is further exacerbated when many workers must attend off-site events requiring travel plans including airfare, sleeping accommodations and local transportation. The distributed nature of the workforce could result in numerous people staying in varying hotels, renting individual cars and/or transportation to and from airports and event locations. This can add up to the redundant cost of travel-related services.
Another problem is the inherent lack of knowledge between workers as to who is attending a given event, further hindering a chance for coordinated travel arrangements. Online systems such as the EVITE invitation service and the YAHOO! CALENDAR and MICROSOFT OUTLOOK scheduling services have brought together group notices of events and meetings. This has allowed workers to know who has been invited and whether they plan to attend a given event. However, such systems do not alleviate the problem of redundancy in the booking of event-related services to attend such off-site events. Organizations have an interest in reducing redundant expenses such as individual rental cars and hotel rooms. However, they often lack the bandwidth to coordinate a sharing of such services.
When people are traveling, sometimes events can require changes in the trip. Such changes may be due to outside influences, such as weather or equipment problems, or they may be due to schedule changes by another party whose plans and actions affect the schedule of the traveler(s). Such changes may then create the myriad of phone calls and confusion to address the unexpected changes.
As a result, what is further needed when changes occur during a trip, is that rather than each traveler in a group traveling together being responsible for making his own travel arrangements by himself, is a process to makes arrangements for the entire group during the travel.